On Good Friday, April 11 1952, a Pan American Douglas DC-4 named Clipper Endeavor took off from San Juan in Puerto Rico, bound for New York. On board were 64 passengers including six infants, plus five crew.

The flight lasted less than nine minutes before two engines lost power. Unable to make it back to the airport, the captain ditched the plane in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 11 miles northwest of San Juan’s Isla Grande Airport.

Remarkably, all 69 people on board survived the impact. What killed 52 of them was what happened afterwards.

The airframe broke apart and began to sink, and in the ensuing chaos, many passengers refused the captain’s order to get out, remaining buckled into their seats. Investigators recorded drowning as the cause for almost all of the deaths.

The pilot told air crash investigators that he had forced some of the passengers into the water. However, the language barrier between the crew and the mostly Puerto Rican passengers had made communication harder – as did their reported fear of sharks in the water.

For 74 years, the wreckage remained hidden under 2,000 feet of water off Puerto Rico’s coast – until an uncrewed underwater vehicle owned by marine survey company Deep Sea Vision located it in June 2026.

As a former commercial airline pilot, the story of this tragedy holds particular interest for me – in particular, the enormous impact it had on how airline safety procedures are still done today. According to Josh Gates, a Discovery Channel presenter who was part of the search team: “It is an accident that fundamentally reshaped aviation as we know it.”

The critical 90 seconds

The US Civil Aeronautics Board’s investigation found that Clipper Endeavor should probably never have taken off. One engine that later failed had shown abnormal fuel readings and metal fragments in its oil the day before.

But the report placed greater weight on what happened after the ditching. There had been no requirement for passengers to be briefed on the plane’s emergency exits, nor to be shown how to use a life vest before a flight over water.

In short, nothing had prepared 64 people for the critical 90 seconds they had to escape the plane before it sank.

As a result of these findings, regulators soon required airlines to keep life vests and rafts accessible to passengers rather than locked away, and to give passengers on extended overwater flights a verbal briefing on life vests, emergency exits and rafts – including demonstrating how to put on a life vest.

The aim was to make sure passengers had already walked through the actions in their minds before panic could override them. A 2018 review of aviation safety research highlighted that many historical air accidents would have resulted in significantly higher survival rates, had every passenger involved read the safety card or watched the crew’s demonstration beforehand.

One apparent example of the importance of passenger safety briefings occurred in January 2009, when Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger ditched US Airways flight 1549 into New York’s Hudson River after a bird strike disabled both engines. All 155 people aboard survived.

However, the official investigation into the incident told a more complicated story than the “Miracle on the Hudson” headlines suggested. About 70% of passengers had not watched any part of the pre-flight briefing, and only around ten had retrieved a life vest themselves.

The evacuation was nonetheless orderly, which investigators credited to the flight crew’s professionalism, the flotation equipment the aircraft was carrying, and ferries reaching survivors within about seven minutes. Clipper Endeavor’s passengers faced almost the same situation decades earlier, with none of that preparation and no one reaching them in time.

Not every incident since the 1952 Pan Am tragedy has ended so fortuitously. Knowing the safety drill is one thing – following it under real pressure is another.

When a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines jet ditched in the Indian Ocean in 1996, killing 125 of the 175 people aboard, the official investigation found that passengers in the economy cabin had inflated their life vests before the aircraft went down.

Crew members had to quickly deflate them and re-brief passengers on the brace position under extraordinary stress. Their instructions were found to have only been given in English, so investigators concluded that some passengers probably hadn’t understood them.

Passenger compliance in an emergency

During my ten years flying Airbus A320s and A330s as a commercial pilot, giving the safety briefing was never my job. That role falls to cabin crew whose professionalism rarely gets the credit it deserves.

The seatbelt sign was mine, though. My voice was the one on the PA reminding passengers to stay buckled in whenever seated – another critical piece of safety advice for as long as the plane is in the air, which Clipper Endeavor’s passengers never received. (If you are not convinced of the seatbelt sign’s importance, read this interview with the passenger who was nearly sucked out of a Ryanair flight recently.)

After each flight, pilots and crew have a debrief that may include discussion of passenger behaviour, particularly if something went wrong during boarding or an emergency. The recurring complaint among cabin crew was about what passengers do the moment an emergency actually starts: reaching for hand luggage instead of leaving it behind.

When an Aeroflot Sukhoi Superjet caught fire after a hard landing in Moscow in 2019, investigators found that passengers retrieving bags from the overhead lockers had probably slowed the evacuation of the burning cabin, contributing to the deaths of 41 people.

A separate study of real emergency evacuations found that half of those involved admitted to attempting to grab a carry-on bag on their way out, making it the most commonly reported obstruction to a fast evacuation.

A 2014 study by aviation safety scientist Brett Molesworth showed that passengers’ recall of safety messages was better if they watched more entertaining demonstrations that used humour or celebrities.

As a result, some airlines now make safety videos both entertaining and informative – such as British Airways dressing more than 40 staff in period costumes for a Regency-style safety film, and Qatar Airways using the American comedian and actor Kevin Hart.

But recall and compliance during a terrifying emergency, when passengers are prone to panic, are two different problems. This is the gap the air travel industry is still striving to solve.

Marco Chan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Humans are not the only animals that communicate. Birds sing to attract mates, dolphins use signature whistles that identify individuals, and many primates produce complex vocalisations that help them coordinate their social lives.

By studying these communication systems, researchers can reconstruct some of the evolutionary steps that eventually led to one of our defining traits: language.

Language doesn’t just mean making sounds – it requires an extraordinary ability to control them. Human speech demands precise coordination between breathing, the vocal folds across the larynx, and our tongue, lips and jaw.

Humans’ closest living relatives – chimpanzees and bonobos – possess vocal tracts that are more similar to ours than scientists once believed. Yet they do not seem to have the same fine voluntary control over the structures – starting with our lips and tongue – that allow us to produce rapid sequences of speech and such diverse sounds.

This raises an intriguing question: when did our ancient ancestors begin to acquire this remarkable vocal control? One possible clue comes from an unexpected source: laughter.

The evolution of laughter

For several years, I have studied the rhythmic structure of vocalisations in non-human primates. Rather than focusing on what calls mean, I have been interested in how they are produced.

The timing of vocalisations can reveal how breathing and vocal movements are coordinated, offering a window into the mechanisms that generate them. Whether analysing the songs of Madagascar’s indris lemur or the calls of orangutans, I kept coming back to the same question: how much control do different primates have over the rhythm of their voices?

Laughter turned out to be an ideal system for exploring this question.

Unlike speech, our ability to laugh is shared with all the great apes. Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans all produce laughter-like vocalisations during play. Although these sound quite different from our familiar “ha ha ha”, they serve similar social functions, signalling playful intentions and strengthening social bonds.

Human laughter is much more diverse, however. We can produce loud belly laughs, quiet chuckles, giggles, snorts or almost silent laughter. We laugh when we are amused but also when we are embarrassed, nervous or trying to ease social tension. This flexibility makes laughter much more than a simple emotional reflex for us.

Human laughter is highly context-dependent. We laugh differently when we are genuinely amused, when we engage in polite social interactions, when we feel awkward, or when we share an inside joke.

Together with colleagues, I analysed 140 laughter bouts from humans and the four other great ape species. Instead of asking whether laughter sounded similar across species, we examined its rhythm: how quickly each laugh element followed the previous one, and how consistent that timing was. Our results revealed a clear evolutionary pattern.

When laughing, humans show greater temporal variability than our closest relatives. Chimpanzees and bonobos produce laughter at a slower rhythm than humans, while gorillas and orangutans laugh at an even slower pace.

In contrast, human laughter consists of more rapidly repeated elements – successive vocal bursts that together form a laugh. This increased flexibility may be one of the evolutionary changes associated with the emergence of finer voluntary control over vocal production.

In other words, humans’ ability to “laugh fast” may reflect one of the key innovations that eventually made speech possible.

The link between laughter and speech

The evolution of speech may not simply have involved producing new sounds, but changing the very tempo at which vocal actions are organised. Our findings suggest traces of this key evolutionary transition are still preserved in one of our most familiar activities: laughing.

While humans and chimpanzees share a common evolutionary history, we will never hear how our ancient ancestors laughed. Fossils preserve bones not vocalisations, so the only way to reconstruct the evolution of laughter is by comparing living species and inferring the changes that occurred along the hominin lineage.

Because we found that chimpanzee and bonobo laughter differs from human laughter in rhythmic structure and temporal variability, we can use these living species to infer that early hominins may have exhibited laughter patterns which were already distinct from those of other great apes during the evolutionary transition towards modern human laughter.

Three-to-four million years ago, early hominins may already have shown some of the foundations of the flexible laughter patterns seen in humans today. Our findings suggest that increased temporal variability in laughter evolved along the hominin lineage. This may have enabled laughter to become increasingly adapted to different social contexts, from playful interactions to maintaining social bonds and signalling affiliation.

Every time we compare ourselves with our closest great ape relatives, we discover that the gap between humans and other apes is smaller than was once imagined. Yet we also uncover subtle differences that may have had profound evolutionary consequences.

Laughter is one of them. It may seem like a simple expression of joy, but hidden within its rhythm is a record of millions of years of evolution – and, perhaps, one of the clues to how our human ancestors eventually found their voice.

Chiara De Gregorio does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Nasa is about to launch a space observatory that could help settle some of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy. The Nancy Grace Roman space telescope will study how the universe began, what it is made of and how it has evolved over time.

The observatory is named after Nasa’s first chief of astronomy and its first female executive. Nancy Grace Roman, who died in 2018 aged 93, made important contributions to our understanding of stars and played a crucial role in shaping Nasa’s space-based astronomy programme.

The telescope is undergoing final preparations ahead of a launch set to take place from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center in late August. It is eight months ahead of its original schedule, and under budget – a rare feat for a Nasa flagship mission.

Unlike the James Webb space telescope, which is designed to look at individual objects in extraordinary detail, Roman is built to survey the sky at scale. It will take in vast areas of the cosmos, allowing astronomers to build up a much broader picture of the universe and how it changes.

Roman has an unusual history. It began life as a “spare” spy satellite, donated to Nasa by the US government agency responsible for gathering intelligence from space.

Roman carries two main instruments, added by Nasa. These are the wide field instrument and the coronagraph. The wide field instrument will detect infrared light coming from the universe. Infrared light has wavelengths that are slightly longer than those of visible light. This allows the instrument to see through cosmic dust and look deeper into the cosmos.

Its field of view – how much sky it sees when pointed in a given direction – is about 100 times that of the Hubble space telescope’s infrared camera, but with similar sharpness. The wide field instrument’s capabilities also mean it can survey the cosmos about 1,000 times faster than Hubble. Observations that would take Hubble centuries could be completed by Roman in a fraction of the time.

The coronagraph is designed to block the overwhelming glare of nearby stars. The idea is a bit like placing a hand in front of the Sun to make it easier to see something faint beside it.

By suppressing starlight, the coronagraph will allow astronomers to test methods for directly imaging faint planets and discs of dust and gas around other stars.

Over the course of its mission, Roman is expected to detect billions of galaxies and tens of billions of stars. Roman’s combination of scale and precision gives the telescope its power. It will see enough of the sky to reveal broad cosmic patterns, while measuring galaxies and stars accurately enough to detect small but important effects.

Cosmic evolution

Modern cosmology – the study of how the universe originated and evolved – rests on a remarkably successful model. According to this model of the universe, ordinary matter – the stuff that makes up stars, planets and people — accounts for just a small fraction of everything out there. The rest of the cosmos is made up of two unseen, mysterious components.

The first is dark matter, which makes up about 25% of the universe. This form of matter neither reflects nor absorbs light, yet its gravitational pull helps hold galaxies together. The mission could help shed light on the nature of dark matter by tracking how it has shaped the formation of galaxies across different epochs of cosmic history.

The second unseen component is dark energy, which makes up around 70% of the universe. Its exact nature remains elusive, but dark energy is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. For decades, astronomers assumed that it is constant, or uniform. However, recent results hint that dark energy could be changing over time. Roman will put these competing ideas to the test.

If dark energy is constant, it points to a universe that keeps expanding forever. If dark energy changes, it could point to new physics beyond our current theories.

Roman may help address a longstanding puzzle: why we observe the universe at a moment when the densities of matter and dark energy are roughly comparable. In the early universe, matter dominated.

In the far future, dark energy is expected to dominate completely. The present era appears to be a transition between the two – a cosmic intermission lasting billions of years, but brief in the lifespan of the universe.

This could be a simple coincidence or a clue to new insights about the cosmos. For example, it could be that dark energy is changing over time, that gravity behaves differently on cosmic scales or that some ingredient is missing from our model of the universe. Distinguishing between these scenarios would require observations across huge spans of cosmic time – exactly the kind of data that Roman will provide.

---

Read more: Dark energy: could the mysterious force seen as constant actually vary over cosmic time?

---

Beyond cosmology

Roman’s science extends well beyond dark energy. It will carry out the largest survey yet of planets beyond our solar system, detecting thousands of new worlds using a technique called gravitational microlensing.

Microlensing happens when the gravity of a foreground star briefly bends and magnifies the light from a more distant background star – acting like a natural magnifying lens passing between us and a distant object. If the foreground star has a planet, that planet can create a small extra brightening in the signal, revealing its presence.

Many of these exoplanets would be difficult to find with the two most widely used techniques to discover exoplanets – the transit and radial velocity methods. Using microlensing, Roman could find planets in wide orbits, low mass planets and even free floating worlds that are not bound to any star.

Roman is also part of a new era of survey astronomy. Its wide-field capabilities place it alongside other major missions. The European Space Agency’s Euclid space mission is mapping billions of galaxies to study dark matter and dark energy. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, built on a mountaintop in Chile, will repeatedly scan the southern sky.

Together, these observatories will help astronomers map the universe across different wavelengths, distances and timescales.

Roman will also work together with the James Webb space telescope, identifying large-scale patterns and unusual objects across the sky, which Webb can then study in detail. This combination of breadth and depth is increasingly important in modern astronomy.

Roman’s greatest impact may come from the unexpected. With repeated observations of large areas of sky, it will detect rare events and previously unseen phenomena. For astronomers, this is one of the mission’s most exciting aspects.

By mapping the universe in unprecedented detail, the Roman telescope will provide a powerful test of our current understanding of cosmology – and potentially point the way to new physics.

Noelia Noël does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Hearing that a new primate species has been named is exciting news for scientists because primates across the world are in decline. According to the IUCN Red list, a global inventory of animal extinction risk, 44.4% of primate species are classed as endangered or critically endangered (versus 13.2% of all mammals).

In most cases when the number of primate species increases, it is because a known species has been upgraded from the status of subspecies to species, or two populations that were previously considered the same species are re-classified into two separate ones. The African monkey Likweli (Colobus congoensis), however, is a completely new addition to the primate family tree, which makes this news particularly interesting.

Likweli is a colobus monkey. The word colobus stems from the ancient Greek word κολοβός, meaning truncated, because they don’t have much of a thumb. It has an orange mouth, lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo and is part of the large subfamily colobines. Colobines are found in both Asia and Africa, but not in the Americas.

Three colobine genera are found in Africa. The olive colobus genus, has one species (a small monkey with drab olive-brown fur and a grey-black face). The red colobus genus and the black-and-white colobus genus, that Likweli belongs to. What is interesting about Likweli is that its closest relative is the black colobus (Colobus satanas), which has two subspecies – the critically endangered Bioko black colobus on the Island Bioko (20 miles off the coast of Cameron) and the Gabon black colobus on the nearby mainland. Their nearest range is 1,200km away from the range of Likweli monkeys.

Colobines have specialist digestive adaptations, including multi-chambered stomachs, that allow them to digest high fibre leaves and toxic seeds. To accommodate their large gut, many colobines are relatively large for monkeys. Likweli is smaller than the other colobus species though, and more comparable to some Asian colobines (like langurs and leafmonkeys). African colobines depend on forests and rarely come to the ground, but they can survive in small forest fragments and mangroves.

Likweli’s orange tinted mouth resembles that of some Asian langurs. But members of the Colobus genus have all black faces, making it almost impossible for human observers to recognise individuals based on their facial features. This also makes it hard to see their facial expressions. Scientists believe these monkeys’ more subtle facial expressions are related to the relatively low levels of competition within groups and less stringent social hierarchies.

Relationships between groups, however, can involve threats, loud roars and sometimes fights. Colobus males produce a loud roar to warn group members of danger, scare off predators, or during encounters with other groups of the same species. Likweli monkeys produce a similar roar although the researchers were unable to determine the sex of the callers. Likweli’s roar resembles that of the black colobus, but is distinctly different from that of other nearby colobus species.

It is not surprising that the central African region is providing new scientific discoveries. The area has been politically unstable for decades and a difficult place to conduct scientific work in. Working in these forests as a scientist means a risk of running into rebels, soldiers and professional poachers.

But the area is not only under-studied, it also represents a birthplace for many new species because the region has diverse soil including one of the largest peatlands on the globe. Plus, the landscape has been shaped and reshaped over centuries by a combination of tectonic plate movement, climatic changes, human influences and changes in its wetlands and rivers. Current climate change forecasts suggest that the area will remain suitable for colobus species in the future.

Some forests in this region contain around 20 species of primate, a value only matched by some Amazonian regions.

Most of those species are cercopithecids, the sister sub-family of the colobines. Likweli also shares its range with the striking Angola colobus, Colobus angolensis and the Lomami red colobus (Piliocolobus parmentieri). Likweli, like many red colobus species, has often been found mingled in with groups of other primates (up to six species), like guenons and sometimes Angola colobus or Lomami red colobus.

There are also apes (gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos) in the region. Chimpanzees in other regions are well known to hunt red and black-and-white colobus monkeys for meat.

Likweli lives in small groups (a mean of six but this can range from one to 20). All Colobus species typically live in units of multiple females together with one male and their offspring. Multi-male groups are rare. Some Colobus species, like the Angola colobus, can form large aggregations of over 200 monkeys, consisting of multiple smaller one-male units travelling together.

The Likweli is only the fifth new African monkey species to have been described since 1975, one of which was a local guenon, the Lesula (Cercopithecus lomamiensis). Meanwhile, Miss Waldron’s red colobus has probably gone extinct as there have been no conclusive sightings since 1978, despite intense searching after some unconfirmed sightings in 2000 and 2001.

The Likweli is already considered endangered and protection of this hotspot for biodiversity is urgently needed.

There may well be more undescribed primates (although another monkey species is unlikely) hiding in these forests. It is nice to imagine that these African forests still contain hidden secrets.

Amanda Korstjens does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Around 80 million years ago, a stretch of tropical coastline in what is now north-eastern Italy was lashed by monsoon rains and tropical cyclones. Those storms swept dinosaur carcasses, crocodiles, plants and river mud onto a tidal flat, where the tides and a film of microbes sealed everything away with extraordinary preservation.

My colleagues and I have published a new study that reconstructs the violent tropical climate behind the Villaggio del Pescatore Lagerstätte near Trieste and reveals it preserves just four decades of life, recorded almost day by day.

The Villaggio del Pescatore site near Trieste is one of the most important Late Cretaceous fossil localities in the Mediterranean. It is the only known site in the region to preserve large land animals, including dinosaurs such as Tethyshadros insularis, from the final 15 million years or so of the age of dinosaurs.

Tethyshadros insularis was a plant-eating, duck-billed dinosaur that lived in what is now north-eastern Italy around 80 million years ago. It was initially interpreted as a dwarf island species, shaped by the “island rule” – that large animals evolve smaller bodies in environments with limited space and resources.

However, the discovery of larger specimens challenged this idea. Up to 11 individuals are potentially preserved in this succession of rocks, with at least three other fairly complete skeletons still waiting to be extracted from the hard (and expensive to cut) limestone rock. Geological evidence has also revealed that the site was about 10 million years older than previously thought and was not part of a tiny, isolated island. Instead, it lay near a larger landmass connected through the ancient Mediterranean region.

The fossils of tiny crocodilians named Acynodon (with shorter muzzles than modern crocodilians) have also been found at this site.

After years of research, Professor Federico Fanti of the University of Bologna and I led a multidisciplinary team of palaeontologists, physicists and geologists to determine exactly how this fossil treasure trove formed. Our findings overturn decades of competing interpretations.

In a study published in Global and Planetary Change, we show that the site was not a quiet, isolated lake or sinkhole, as previously suggested. Our results suggest it was a storm-battered tidal flatland at the edge of a tropical sea.

Villaggio del Pescatore is not simply a place where fossils happen to be beautifully preserved. It is also a record of the weather that shaped the site. We can identify individual storms and floods in the rocks, almost day by day. Very few fossil sites on Earth allow us to do that.

Reading the rock like a calendar

The fossils at Villaggio del Pescatore are concentrated in a finely layered carbonate rock, marked by thousands of paper-thin light and dark bands. For years these were interpreted as annual layers (like tree rings) laid down season by season.

Our new analysis tells a different story. Using high-resolution X-ray scans at the Elettra Synchrotron in Trieste, alongside detailed geochemical and microscopic analyses, we showed that the bands were not annual but daily. A synchrotron accelerates electrons (particles with a negative charge) to almost the speed of light. This produces powerful X-rays that can penetrate dense materials such as rock. This allowed us to examine structures inside the rocks and bones at a resolution of fractions of a millimetre.

The scans revealed that the layers were deposited by ocean tides, two pairs each day. These tides varied according to the familiar fortnightly cycle of stronger and weaker tides that still happen today. We could count these tidal layers, thanks to this unparalleled resolution.

The entire fossil-bearing rock pile, our results calculate, accumulated in only about 40 years, a single human lifetime, frozen in stone. Most fossil deposits containing several individuals average together thousands or millions of years. Here, we’re looking at a few decades.

Monsoons, cyclones and microbes

To explain why storms were so central to the preservation of the fossils, the team ran climate simulations. The models consistently placed the site at around 29° north, inside a powerful, summer-dominated monsoon belt. This was a tropical regime of intensely wet summers and recurring tropical cyclones, sustained by the greenhouse climate of the age.

Monsoon-driven floods and cyclone surges created pulses of sediment, nutrients, plant debris and animal carcasses onto the tidal flat. The tides trapped this material, and mats of microbes rapidly stabilised it. This encouraged the sediment to harden right after the carcass was deposited, before it started rotting or predators could scavenge its dead tissues. These storms were the main agents behind this preservation.

The site’s three most important Tethyshadros insularis dinosaurs show a range of fates: one buried so quickly that soft-tissue outlines survive, another bearing the cracked, sun-dried bones of a carcass that lay exposed inland before being washed in by a flood. Crocodilians such as Acynodon adriaticus, fish and shrimps were also local residents, entombed close to where they lived and died.

We propose that this combination of “ingredients”, monsoon floods, tidal trapping and microbial sealing, represents a recipe for creating exceptionally preserved fossil sites in hot, tropical greenhouse climates – precisely the kind of setting in which rapid decay would normally destroy organic remains.

The study also offers an ancient perspective on how intensifying monsoons and cyclones can reshape coastlines, ecosystems and what becomes preserved along tropical shores.

Villaggio del Pescatore has been studied for more than four decades, yet it still has new stories to tell. Understanding how extreme storms transformed this ancient coastline may also help us think about how modern coasts could respond to a warmer and more turbulent climate fuelled by high levels of CO₂.

Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza works for University College London, Department of Earth Sciences. He receives funding from The Royal Society as a Newton International Research Fellow.

The obituaries were being written before the body was cold. Within hours of Prime Minister Andy Burnham confirming that Whitehall’s responsibilities for science and technology would be absorbed into a new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (DBIST), Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, was on Radio 4 warning that “science isn’t a slave to business”. The trade association TechUK declared it “the wrong change at the wrong time”.

You might imagine that something ancient, ineffable and essential to British science had been ripped away. In fact, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) was only born in February 2023 – a surprise late tweak to the machinery of government under Rishi Sunak’s faltering premiership.

Science has never enjoyed a settled home in Whitehall. For most of the period from 1995 to 2023, it sat precisely where Burnham has put it now: inside a business super-department. Notably, the single most important protection UK science secured in that era – a ring-fenced budget through the George Osborne austerity years – was won from inside the Business, Innovation and Science department, under then-business secretary Vince Cable.

The historian David Edgerton has long argued that Britain’s fondness for tinkering with the machinery of government is a form of displacement activity. What actually shapes the fortunes of research is money, people and demand for what they produce, not the nameplates on London’s Victoria Street.

On that test, the outlook for science is far calmer than some reactions to this latest move would suggest. Under plans published last October, the UK’s total research and development budget is locked in at £58.5 billion over the four-year spending review to 2030 – a real-terms increase.

Machinery changes move budget lines across departments; they don’t unravel them. As yet, nothing we’ve heard from the Burnham government suggests the settlement for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is at risk.

A US wrecking ball

If we want to be reminded what real damage to a science system looks like, we only need to glance across the Atlantic. While London rearranges the departmental furniture and dishes out new email addresses, Washington is taking a wrecking ball to the foundations of its public science system.

A 2027 budget request will halve the size of the US National Science Foundation, if passed. A draft White House rule, due to take effect in October, will hand political appointees the power to vet federal research grants against “the president’s priorities” and terminate awards mid-stream.

A predictable exodus has begun. The Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi has just left the University of California, Berkeley for Tsinghua University in China.

Set against political commissars patrolling the borders of knowledge, the UK’s science soap opera feels deeply provincial – a debate about which secretary of state sponsors oversight of a gradually swelling budget.

And the institutional layer beneath this is in better shape than doomsayers allow. UKRI’s new strategy has set a clear five-year path: priority programmes in AI, quantum and clean energy, faster funding decisions, and a welcome seriousness about experimentation with the modes and means by which we manage public investment in research.

Not everyone is happy with UKRI’s approach to prioritisation. But a funder with a published strategy, agreed budget and hard targets is a more durable asset than a three-year-old ministry. The research councils have outlasted every department that ruled over them, and UKRI will outlast this too.

Nor should the science community be spooked by closer proximity to business. When I leave my office at UCL and stroll down the Euston Road through London’s Knowledge Quarter – dubbed “the new square mile” – I pass by the Wellcome Trust, the Crick and Turing institutes, the British Library, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. Day in, day out, this dense weave of labs, firms and cultural institutions delivers what the triple helix of government, industry and academia is all about.

And we can find versions of the same story unfolding in Manchester, Sheffield, Cambridge and Glasgow. Rather than science being subordinate or “enslaved”, the UK’s world-leading universities have spent the past decade aligning themselves with agendas for regional growth and frontier technologies.

But there’s a harder truth lurking here too. Public money accounts for less than a third of UK research and development investment. The rest is financed and largely performed by the private sector.

UK science’s chronic weakness has never been the quality of publicly funded research. It is the R&D intensity of UK firms, and their ability to convert discoveries into products, services and revenue streams generated and owned in the UK.

If yoking science to industrial strategy in a single department reminds Whitehall to treat these as a single problem, some good may come of Burnham’s reorganisation.

AI policy concerns

With DSIT’s disappearance, a particular source of concern has been the future of AI policy. This at a time when the radical possibilities and risks of AI frontier models, fluctuating US export controls, and the latest “Sputnik moment” jolt from China’s Kimi K-3 demand sustained and technically fluent policy attention.

We are also seeing a sharp acceleration in the ways AI is transforming science itself – whether by cracking mathematical problems that stumped humans for the past 87 years, or collapsing decades-old models of grant writing and peer review.

Splitting AI from science just as they converge in practice would have been the least defensible element of this reorganisation. So it is reassuring that cross-government oversight of AI, including the AI Security Institute and AI public sector adoption, is moving to a new “AI taskforce” in the Cabinet Office – alongside the promotion of Kanishka Narayan to the status of AI minister attending Cabinet. Much now rests on his shoulders.

Government departments come and go. Those of us who have long advocated for research policies built on evidence rather than gut can allow ourselves a wry smile at the fuss created by this latest reorganisation – and then get back to work.

DSIT is dead, but UK science will be fine. Keep your eyes on the AI prize – and be thankful we are arguing about organograms, not survival.

James Wilsdon receives funding from UKRI and the Wellcome Trust, and a wider consortium of international research funders who partner in the Research on Research Institute (RoRI).

During an eight-month-long research trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia, we studied consolation: the way bonobos and chimpanzees comfort each other after conflicts and distress. But early on, we kept noticing something that didn’t quite fit.

The animals were exchanging a lot of friendly physical contact, embracing, touching and kissing, in competitive situations before any clear conflict or distress signals had broken out. We started wondering what all that touching was actually for.

Our new research into how great apes manage social stress suggests it could be quite important, and that this behaviour dates back at least 6 million years, long before our species evolved. Like us, our closest ape cousins, the bonobos and chimpanzees, also navigate stressful and competitive situations every day.

One example is when they discover a tree laden with ripe fruit. Everyone wants to eat and conflicts of interest can often lead to fights. But something else caught our attention. More often, apes reach out to one another with friendly touch: embracing, patting and making gentle contact.

Our colleague Edwin van Leeuwen, a Dutch biologist, had developed a feeding task to measure social tolerance across great ape groups. This task is called the peanut swing. It involves filling a bamboo trough with peanuts and swinging it over the fence so the food lands in front of the apes. This spreads peanuts evenly across a small area while researchers record who gets food, and how much. We used this test to measure whether groups could share resources peacefully in close proximity.

Because the apes watched the trough being filled, we could observe how they behaved as anticipation built. Friendly touch clustered in the minutes just before the food arrived. Previous researchers called this celebration behaviour. But discovering food is not just a cause to celebrate. It is also tense and risky.

Could friendly physical contact be helping to keep that tension at bay?

To find out, we measured a five-minute anticipation period before the food was released. We watched everything the apes did: friendly contact like kissing, embracing and patting, as well as aggression and threats. Over several months, we filmed 116 apes from five groups across 60 sessions at two African sanctuaries, Lola ya Bonobo in the DRC and Chimfunshi in Zambia.

In both species, the answer was clear. Bonobos and chimpanzees who engaged in more reassuring friendly contact before the food arrived spent significantly more time feeding peacefully alongside others afterwards. This pattern held across most groups and was strongest in the most tolerant ones. Researchers consider tolerance – the willingness to share space without aggression – to be the foundation of cooperation and social learning across the animal kingdom. Our findings suggest that pre-emptive friendly touch may be part of how that tolerance is maintained.

The patterns followed the social structure of each species. In bonobos, female-female pairs were the most likely to show friendly reassurance. This reflects how bonobo society works: females form strong alliances to counter male aggression and occupy high status positions. In chimpanzees, it was males who reassured each other most, reflecting the importance of male coalitions in their societies.

For both apes, these patterns were clearest in the more tolerant groups. In groups with more authoritarian leaders, the pattern disappeared.

Some of the most striking behaviour we saw were among the chimpanzees. During tense moments, they placed fingers, hands and other body parts inside each other’s mouths. They also held each other’s genitals. For a species known for lethal aggression, these are extraordinarily risky things to do.

Perhaps the vulnerability is itself the signal of trust. You only offer a risky contact if you are confident the other animal won’t bite. And this communicates something important about how you see the relationship.

---

Read more: Inside the sex lives of chimpanzees: it’s about much more than just reproduction

---

Touch is among humanity’s oldest forms of communication. Skin-to-skin contact between infants and caregivers is one of the first channels through which attachment forms, long before language develops. A 2006 study found holding a romantic partner’s hand can reduce threat-related brain activity. A 2001 paper found that a brief touch from a stranger can increase cooperation.

Research across five European cultures published in 2015 found that the area of the body you’ll let someone touch maps almost directly onto the strength of your emotional bond with them. There’s plenty of cultural variation though. Brits are famously more guarded about casual contact than other Europeans, and touch between men in many western contexts carries particular social weight.

Perhaps most strikingly, touch before competition makes a difference. A study of negotiators found that pairs who shook hands before bargaining cooperated more, lied less and reached better joint outcomes, even in situations where cooperation came at a personal cost. A handshake may signal something important about intent before a word is even spoken.

But physical contact matters even during competition. A 2010 study of all 30 teams in the US National Basketball Association during the 2008-09 season found that the teams who touched more during games early in the season, through fist bumps, hugs and high fives, performed better and played more cooperatively later. This held even after controlling for player salaries and preseason expectations. In another 2024 study of women’s college basketball, players who received more physical contact from teammates after missing their first free throw were more likely to score on the second.

We see the same thing in genuinely high-stakes situations too. Research analysing street conflicts using CCTV found that witnessing a fight increased anxiety in bystanders. But, those who then engaged in physical contact with others showed reduced anxiety afterwards. A separate study of consolation after street robberies found that the way bystanders approached and touched victims closely mirrored the post-conflict consolation we observe in chimpanzees.

Humans, bonobos and chimpanzees all use reassuring touch but our evolutionary lineages split over 6 million years ago. The simplest explanation is that reassuring touch predates all three of us, and is certainly far older than our own species. So let’s not forget that we hold within us powerful and ancient behaviour that can help us manage our social worlds and maintain peace.

Jake Brooker receives funding from Templeton World Charity Foundation (Diverse Intelligences Initiative) and NWO Talent Programme.

Zanna Clay has received funding from Templeton World Charity Foundation (Diverse Intelligences Initiative) for this work.

According to our best understanding, the universe is expanding – and is doing so at an accelerating rate. This is believed to be caused by something called the “cosmological constant”, which was first proposed by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity. In recent decades, it has become better known as dark energy, which is believed to make up about 70% of the universe.

Crucial to this realisation were studies of Type Ia supernovae – exploding white dwarf stars. These are thought to emit a specific amount of light, which allows astronomers to determine their distances very accurately and thereby track the expansion of the universe. This work was awarded the 2011 Nobel prize in physics.

The accelerating expansion of the universe is thought to be due to negative pressure, an unusual property of dark energy that allows it to overcome the attractive force of gravity. Yet the exact nature of dark energy remains a puzzle. It cannot be explained by our best theory for the fundamental building blocks of the universe – known as the standard model of particle physics.

However, it is an integral part of another theory, devised to explain how the large-scale universe came to be. This is the standard model of cosmology, also called the lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model.

Other observational evidence supporting the existence of dark energy includes fluctuations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the “afterglow of the Big Bang” – and the imprint of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) – sound waves from the early universe – in the distribution of galaxies.

But the ΛCDM model has come under increasing scrutiny as new data has emerged. A conference hosted by the UK’s Royal Society debated emerging cracks in the standard cosmological model. It has been noted that the model’s past successes may partly be due to “confirmation bias” – the unconscious tendency to favour information that supports our existing beliefs while giving less attention to information that challenges them.

---

Read more: Relax, the expansion of the universe is still accelerating

---

Flawed framework?

Most cosmologists remain unconvinced by such criticism and are instead persuaded by the multiple lines of evidence that the universe’s expansion is accelerating.

However, all such analyses, for example of the CMB or BAO, are conducted using a special solution of Einstein’s equations called the FLRW (Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker) framework. This is a description of space-time that assumes the “cosmological principle”, namely that the universe is, on average, homogeneous and isotropic (looks the same in all directions).

However, our recent study found evidence to falsify the FLRW framework, presenting results showing that the universe is asymmetric, or lopsided. We believe this presents a fundamental challenge to dark energy by undermining the very basis for standard analyses of cosmological data.

The observation that the universe may be lopsided is known as the cosmic dipole anomaly. This anomaly cannot be fixed by tweaking parameters in the ΛCDM model. It requires starting again from scratch to build a model of the universe based on observations, rather than on a philosophical principle.

The Nobel prize winning astrophysicist Jim Peebles has said that the cosmic dipole anomaly is about as well established as another cosmological irregularity known as the Hubble tension. However, he notes, the cosmic dipole anomaly has received only a fraction of the interest heaped on the Hubble tension.

With my collaborators, Mohamed Rameez and his PhD student Animesh Sah at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, we have also shown that the acceleration of the expansion of the universe inferred from Type Ia supernovae is not the same in all directions.

The signal from supernovae is mainly aligned with a temperature difference in the afterglow of the Big Bang – the cosmic microwave background. This temperature difference, called the CMB dipole anisotropy, is believed to be due to the local motion of the solar system.

‘Tilted observers’

The acceleration inferred from supernovae cannot therefore be due to dark energy. Rather, it is probably an illusion, because we are “tilted observers”. This is because of Earth’s specific location in the cosmos, where our neighbouring galaxies are participating in a large-scale but localised streaming motion called the bulk flow.

The relationship between the intrinsic brightness of Type Ia supernovae and their distance has been crucial to the idea of dark energy. However, this relationship may not be as robust as was first assumed.

Astronomers in South Korea found evidence that the ages of the white dwarf stars that produce Type Ia supernovae (their progenitors) affect their brightness. However, this has been challenged by another team.

When we corrected for the dependence of the intrinsic brightness on the progenitor age, the indication is that the universe is decelerating, rather than accelerating.

This is just as is expected for a universe without dark energy. But it will come as a surprise to most cosmologists who believe that there is compelling independent evidence for ΛCDM, in particular from studies of the CMB. But CMB temperature fluctuations are not influenced by dark energy. Rather, they are related to the spatial curvature of the universe, the baryon density, and the dark matter density.

Whether dark energy is still a valid inference thus depends on whether the distribution of matter in the universe is indeed isotropic – exactly the same in all directions. Observations suggest otherwise. If these findings are confirmed, they could signal a paradigm shift in cosmology.

Subir Sarkar receives funding from the UK Research & Innovation councils and from the Indian Ministry of Science & Technology.

Nine-year-old Eva was watching an episode of the children’s show Horrible Histories about the stone age recently when a question popped into her head. The cave men were speaking a broken form of English, but Eva thought that didn’t sound right and she wondered: how was the first language formed?

She joined our host Eloise to get some answers from anthropologist April Nowell on The Conversation’s Curious Kids podcast.

In each episode of The Conversation’s Curious Kids, a child joins host Eloise to ask a top researcher their burning question.

To listen to season two, follow us wherever you get your podcasts, or listen on the Yoto Player via the Discover section on the Yoto interactive audio platform for kids.

You can also listen back to season one and read lots of answers to questions sent in by children around the world in our Curious Kids series.

Got a question? Pop it in an email, or record it and send us the audio to curiouskids@theconversation.com.

---

This season of The Conversation’s Curious Kids is supported by the University of Southampton in the UK, a world-leading research-intensive university with a global network of international students and campuses in Malaysia and Delhi.

---

Disclosure statement

April Nowell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Credits

This episode of The Conversation’s Curious Kids was hosted and mixed by Eloise Stevens. The producer was Katie Flood and the executive producer was Gemma Ware. Credits in this episode to Horrible Histories, Pysched for Nature and Wild Ambience.

Correction

Part of the script in this podcast initially suggested Neanderthals had made circles, zigzags, and arrow symbols in a cave around 40,000 years ago. This has been amended to make it clear that markings made by Neanderthals found in caves in France and Spain were of dots, tracings made by fingers and a symbol that looks a bit like a hash tag, and they were from around 50,000 years ago.

In a world where trust in institutions is mostly in decline, levels of trust in science remain relatively high. Yet at the same time, belief in scientific conspiracy theories, such as hushed-up effects of vaccines or aeroplane “chemtrails”, is also widespread.

What explains this apparent contradiction? Our work suggests we need to ask a different question – not how much people trust science, but which sources inform their understanding of what science is and how it works.

In our recent study of 843 US residents, we found that people who picture scientific progress as the work of lone geniuses, and who learn about science mainly from podcasts and documentaries, are markedly more drawn to conspiracy theories – whatever their level of education.

This fits the bigger picture very well. In a 16-country survey, 70% of respondents believed at least one false or unproven health claim. High trust in science and widespread conspiracy beliefs appear to coexist in the same populations.

We fear that trust in science is compatible with believing almost anything, so long as it is expressed in plausibly scientific terms. This can lead to some people refusing vaccines, trusting miracle cures or dismissing climate warnings – all while remaining convinced that science is on their side.

The ‘lone genius’ trope

At school, science is almost always presented as a linear sequence of achievements, or in the form of impersonal theories. The human side of discovery is largely stripped out.

In contrast, most science-focused films and documentaries build their narratives around biographies of exceptional individuals.

These often yield a familiar plot. Society is facing an intractable problem. A genius arrives with the exact solution – but is ignored and mocked until, after much personal pain, everyone realises he (for it is invariably a man) was right all along.

From the martyrdom of Giordano Bruno, the Renaissance friar burned at the stake partly for defending an infinite universe, to A Beautiful Mind, the Oscar-winning portrait of the mathematician John Nash, this lone-genius arc has permeated popular depictions of science for centuries.

Many conspiracy theorists seek to exploit this trope – in part to suggest that those who recognise it must be unusually smart too, living in a world where everyone else is “naive” or “brainwashed”.

Yet these lone genius plots leave out nearly everything that makes science work. Namely, the rather boring and complex processes of accumulation and evaluation, from peer review to replication and endless disagreements, through which reliable knowledge emerges from a crowd of people and institutions.

Research also shows that people presented with academic research “in the making”, without definitive conclusions, often read any hesitations or equivocations as scientific weakness, rather than honesty.

Most people trust science without understanding its technicalities. This means trust can easily be attached to shared cultural markers of “scientificity”: technical vocabulary, charts, credentials, fancy equipment, numbers quoted to impressive precision. In other words, whoever displays the right cues sounds plausibly scientific.

Consider the example of Corrado Malanga, an Italian chemist who developed an elaborate theory of aliens harvesting human souls, and his collaborator Filippo Biondi, a radar researcher. Using satellite radar, the pair claimed in March 2025 to have discovered an elaborate hidden city up to two kilometres beneath the Khafre pyramid in Egypt.

Archaeologists quickly and widely dismissed these claims, in part because this kind of radar cannot see more than a few metres underground. Yet Biondi went on to present their “discovery” at length on The Joe Rogan Experience, one of the world’s most popular podcasts, in January 2026 – attracting many millions of views and listens to this widely disputed “scientific account”.

A recent analysis examined 8.7 million Twitter (now X) posts that shared supposedly fact-checked news stories. It found that references to scientific entities – through use of terms such as scientist, university or study – were associated with an increase in sharing. However, this was especially true of “low-veracity content, and when users lean politically to the right”.

More likely to endorse conspiracy theories

There are two threads intertwining here: a story about how science progresses, and the informal media where it mostly lives.

In our recent study, published in Current Psychology, we measured participants’ “genius mentality” (the propensity to believe that progress comes from exceptional individuals overturning consensus through intuition) and also their science media preference (whether they favoured podcasts and documentaries over expert-vetted sources).

We found people who scored higher on either metric were more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. These correlative effects were stronger than either education or political orientation, factors usually considered major drivers of such beliefs.

We also observed an interesting moderation effect: among people with little or even moderate trust in scientists, a high belief in the genius mentality markedly increased conspiracy belief. Among those who trusted scientists most, it made almost no difference.

From our research, we believe standard remedies, fact-checks and appeals to “trust the science” miss a deeper problem. They may correct claims one at a time, but leave untouched core beliefs (and misunderstandings) about how science works.

A more durable approach is to make the collective machinery visible: to explain why debate, peer review and the slow building of consensus, rather than individual intuition, are what make science reliable.

Some science education researchers argue that the goal should not be to turn everyone into a scientist, but a “competent outsider” – people who can correctly evaluate where knowledge comes from and how it has been produced.

We believe a school science education should not only introduce theories, but explain how the scientific community works on a daily basis. Children need to learn how knowledge emerges from many people cooperating and challenging each other within shared criteria – and that any consensus which survives this process is a strength, not groupthink.

Our ambition is to protect against future conspiracy theories before they emerge, rather than simply trying to correct the last one.

Michele d'Errico receives funding from the Irish Research Council.

Taha Yasseri receives funding from Research Ireland and Workday Inc.

Spain will play Argentina in the Fifa World Cup final on Sunday. The highly anticipated match takes place in New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, with the teams vying for the most coveted prize in football.

Attacking flair and physicality will no doubt play a role. But we could also see an underappreciated element of football come to the fore: geometry.

In their 2-0 World Cup semi-final win over France, Spain formed neat passing triangles around the French players. This sometimes made it look as if Spain had extra people on the field.

Wherever a Spanish player received the ball, two teammates appeared at different angles – with their French opponents seemingly always arriving a fraction too late.

The triangle mattered not because it was neat, but because it gave Spain choice and France uncertainty. Each pass forced a French defender to commit to one possible future: press the ball, block the inside route, or protect the space behind. By the time that choice was made, the ball had often moved and the geometry had changed again.

Spain were not simply finding space. They were controlling when and where the next space would appear.

Forcing choices

Put three attackers in a straight line and one defender can often block both supporting players. But move one supporting player sideways and the passing lines separate.

The defender must choose which route to close. Press the ball and a pass can go around them. Protect the inside route and the outside may open. If another defender steps across, a Spanish player can attack the space left behind.

A useful football triangle does not need equal sides or 60-degree angles. Its best shape changes with defenders’ positions, body orientation, ball speed and the space available.

A narrow triangle is easy to squeeze because one defender may block both lanes. A wide one makes the pass travel farther, giving an opponent more time to intercept it.

In their semi-final match against France, Spain found the middle ground again and again – close enough for quick combinations, but far enough apart to stretch France’s press.

A pitch made of probabilities

Football geometry is a problem of time as well as space. A passing lane is not open simply because no defender is standing in it. The key question is whether the ball reaches the receiver before an opponent reaches the interception point.

A diagram shows where players are – but a useful model of the game asks where players can get to. Research using player-tracking data estimates control of the pitch from players’ position, direction, speed and acceleration. The result is a constantly changing map of who is most likely to reach each area first.

Pedro Porro’s 58th-minute semi-final goal offered a compact example when, after exchanging passes with teammate Dani Olmo, he continued his run to score Spain’s second. The first pass shifted the defenders’ focus. Porro’s movement created a new angle for the return.

A living network

Three-player combinations make this idea even harder to defend. Spain’s strength was not just one triangle, but the speed with which several overlapped. A midfielder could be one corner of multiple shapes, connected to a defender, full-back, winger and another midfielder.

Passing-network research describes players as points and passes as links. Yet a final network diagram for a given football match misses something important: Spain were rebuilding those links with every movement and first touch they made.

The value of a pass is not only where the ball goes, but how it changes what could happen next. That is why ten sideways passes are not automatically better than one pass that removes two defenders.

The shape that conquered basketball

Triangles are not unique to football. Under head coach Phil Jackson (1987-1998), US basketball team the Chicago Bulls made frequent use of a tactic called Tex Winter’s triangle offence. This places three players on one side of the court to create passing, cutting and scoring routes.

The sport was different but the principle was the same: triangles preserve alternatives. Close one route and another remains; follow the ball and space opens elsewhere.

In their match against Spain, France’s problem was not simply a lack of running. Pressing works only when several defenders move together and close connected passing options.

After the match, Kylian Mbappé said there had been “a lack of communication” in France’s pressing. Spain kept moving before France could reorganise.

A triangle on a tactics board does nothing by itself. Its power depends on players scanning before receiving, opening their bodies, and using the first touch to preserve the option of more than one next action.

The deeper contest was between Spain’s speed of reconfiguration and France’s speed of recognition. Spain kept changing the problem faster than France could solve it. The triangles were visible – but their real advantage was control over what could happen next.

Will we see a similar approach deployed in the final? Argentina will no doubt be closely studying their opponent’s tactics from other matches. But geometry will still play a prominent role – and may even prove a deciding factor.

Conor Boland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Deep beneath the French-Swiss border, the world’s largest scientific instrument has fallen silent. After years of smashing proton particles together at nearly the speed of light, Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has stopped operations and entered a long shutdown.

While no particle collisions are taking place at the LHC, thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians are dismantling parts of the machine, installing new technologies and preparing one of the most ambitious upgrades ever attempted in experimental physics.

When it switches on again, around 2030, it will become the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), capable of delivering roughly seven times more data than the collider that discovered the Higgs boson.

For me, this shutdown marks another milestone in a project that has shaped much of my scientific life. I first became involved in the High-Luminosity collider long before the Higgs boson particle was discovered in 2012. Over nearly two decades I have had the privilege of contributing to the programme on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the United States, I served as upgrade coordinator for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), a key experiment at the LHC. The CMS is built at one of the points within the Large Hadron Collider where separate beams of proton particles collide. CMS then captures data from these collisions so that it can be analysed by Cern physicists. I helped lead the international effort preparing CMS for the HL-collider era.

Today, in Oxford, I work on another LHC experiment called Atlas. Atlas and CMS work in broadly similar ways, but having two machines like this helps ensure significant discoveries by one experiment are cross-checked by a counterpart with a separate team of scientists. Here, my colleagues and I are building silicon pixel detector modules for its upgraded inner tracker. This will form a vital part of the HL-LHC upgrade.

A few months ago, I watched the first complete pixel ring assembled in Oxford. It was strikingly beautiful: a delicate arrangement of silicon sensors, electronics and support structures whose elegance reflected years of painstaking engineering.

For the first time, the detector we had imagined through countless design reviews, prototypes and production meetings had become real.

Our contribution is just one part of a detector being built by teams across the world. Thousands of components must come together before the High Luminosity collider is ready to explore a new frontier in particle physics.

The LHC has already transformed our understanding of nature. Its discovery of the Higgs boson confirmed the mechanism that gives elementary particles their mass. The Higgs had been the last missing piece in the standard model of particle physics. This is the best theory to explain elementary particles and the three fundamental forces that govern their interactions. But, as is often the case in science, answering one question opened many others.

Investigating the Higgs

Many of the most important questions now are no longer about whether the Higgs exists, but whether it behaves exactly as predicted. Tiny deviations from the standard model could point towards entirely new particles or forces. Such discoveries would help us understand mysteries such as dark matter or why the universe contains far more matter than antimatter.

The challenge is that these clues are incredibly subtle. Rather than requiring much higher collision energies, they demand vastly more collisions. The HL-LHC will increase the collider’s luminosity – the number of proton collisions it produces – by about a factor of seven over its lifetime.

Imagine replacing a camera that takes one photograph every second with one that captures seven. Each image looks much the same, but together they reveal details that would otherwise remain invisible.

For Higgs physics, that extra data will be transformative. The Higgs boson is remarkably elusive. Some of its most interesting decays – where it transforms into other particles – are so rare that they have remained just beyond the reach of today’s LHC. Others have only recently emerged as tantalising hints.

One example is the decay of the Higgs boson into two muons (a muon is an unstable, subatomic particle). This decay is a rare process that tests whether the Higgs couples to second-generation lepton particles. Another is the decay of the Higgs into charm quark particles. This is one of the most difficult Higgs measurements because it must be extracted from an overwhelming background of ordinary particle collisions.

These processes test one of the Higgs boson’s most fundamental properties: whether it interacts with lighter particles exactly as predicted by the standard model. Any deviation from those predictions, even a small one, could be evidence that new particles or forces are influencing the Higgs behind the scenes.

And perhaps the most ambitious goal of all is observing Higgs boson pairs, which would allow us to measure, for the first time, the Higgs self-coupling – the strength with which the Higgs field interacts with itself. That interaction determines the shape of the Higgs field that fills all of space and is thought to have played a key role in the evolution of the universe moments after the Big Bang.

These are exactly the kinds of measurements that motivated the design of the upgraded LHC. Achieving them requires a revolution not only in the accelerator itself but also in the detectors that record the collisions.

Particle web

At the High Luminosity LHC, every crossing of the proton beams will produce up to 200 simultaneous proton-proton interactions, several times more than today. Untangling this dense web of particles demands detectors that are faster, more precise and far more resistant to radiation than anything built before.

At the heart of the Atlas and CMS experiments, entirely new silicon tracking detectors are replacing the existing ones. They must survive radiation levels that would quickly destroy previous generations of sensors while measuring particle trajectories with extraordinary precision. Achieving this has required years of advances in silicon sensor technology, ultra-fast electronics, cooling systems and lightweight mechanical structures.

One of the most innovative features of the upgraded detectors is the addition of precision timing. New timing detectors – the High Granularity Timing Detector in Atlas and a similar system in CMS – will measure the arrival time of particles with a precision of only a few tens of trillionths of a second. Although hundreds of collisions occur almost simultaneously, they do not happen at exactly the same instant.

By adding time as a fourth dimension to particle tracking, these detectors will allow physicists to associate each particle with the correct collision, making it possible to reconstruct rare Higgs events hidden within an enormous background of overlapping interactions.

One of the greatest rewards of working on these detectors is seeing the next generation of physicists preparing to use them. The students helping to assemble today’s detectors will spend much of their careers analysing the data they eventually collect.

When the HL–LHC begins operating, it will not simply extend the scientific programme of the Large Hadron Collider. It will usher in a new era of precision Higgs physics. Whether it reveals subtle cracks in the standard model or confirms our current understanding with unprecedented accuracy, it will shape particle physics for decades to come.

Daniela Bortoletto is a member of the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

Warm sticky nights are becoming more and more common in the UK.

Climate change is raising temperatures, but one factor that adds to that is often ignored. Walk down a city street and you see what would have been front gardens a decade or so ago have now been tarmacked over and turned into driveways.

Individually these changes might seem small, but as more and more gardens disappear this increase in hard driveways can alter the way neighbourhoods heat up during the day and cool down at night. It’s an issue that is suddenly on more people’s minds this summer as they struggle to sleep.

According to a UK’s Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) report in 2025, 42% of domestic garden space is now paved over, including 55% of front garden space.

In 2005, only about 8% of UK front gardens were fully paved. By 2015, that figure had tripled to roughly 24%.

Estimates from the RHS suggest there are 20.6 million domestic gardens (front and back) in the UK, covering around 502,757 hectares. The UK’s domestic gardens together cover an area around three times larger than all national nature reserves combined, giving them enormous potential to support wildlife.

Replacing vegetation with hard surfaces also shrinks habitat for plants and wildlife while increasing surface runoff and the risk of flooding.

The desire for more off-street parking may have contributed to this trend. The shift to electric vehicles could have created another incentive to pave front gardens, as goverment grants helped households finance home-charging points.

How paving stokes heat

Impervious surfaces including asphalt (which many driveways are made of) absorbs heat, raising ground and air temperatures. They both absorb up to 95% of incoming solar radiation during the day, reaching surface temperatures of 50-55°C, compared to 27-32°C for grass or tree-covered areas.

During the day, this heat is stored and slowly released after sunset. This is known as the urban heat island effect. The result is warmer night-time air temperatures, particularly during heatwaves. Unlike vegetation, these hard materials have little capacity to cool themselves through evaporation, and are making cities hotter.

This heat island effect can raise cities’ temperatures by 1-3°C compared to surrounding countryside. That’s why it always feels hotter in the city on summer nights.

---

Read more: Heatwaves: how to close the UK’s cooling divide

---

And the result can also cause health problems. The 2018 summer heatwave saw an estimated 399 (of 785) heat-related deaths in the Greater London area attributable to this night-time effect.

Paved front gardens eliminate evaporative cooling (the process by which plants release water vapour), which lowers air temperatures. Plants and trees provide cooling through shading and evapotranspiration (defined as the combined loss of water to the atmosphere through two processes: evaporation and transpiration). In urban environments, green spaces release moisture into the air, which humidifies the atmosphere and significantly reduces air temperature, a mechanism entirely absent in paved areas.

What needs to change?

Changing front driveways back to grass can reduce daytime surface temperatures by 1.5-2.0°C and nighttime temperatures by 0.3-0.5°C. Adding trees doubles the benefit: daytime cooling of 2.0-3.0°C and nighttime reductions of 0.5-1.0°C. Therefore, increasing urban greenery by 10% – particularly planting trees – can lower average air temperatures by around 0.5°C.

Front gardens with plants rather than driveways can also reduce flood risk by absorbing rain, filter air pollutants, support biodiversity and improve mental wellbeing. The RHS estimates that restoring plant cover in one million front gardens could save millions of litres of stormwater run-off annually.

But there are ways to have a driveway that doesn’t create so much heat. London’s De-pave Your Garden campaign offers guidance on replacing concrete with permeable paving, gravel or planting strips, an approach that has since been promoted by London boroughs including Lambeth and Ealing.

Leeds City Council’s front garden design guide encourages householders to retain at least 30% green space.

Other things could help change people’s attitudes to front gardens and their value. Financial incentives, such as council tax rebates for depaving or grants for rain gardens, could accelerate change.

In the future, public policy must recognise private gardens as green infrastructure, not merely private amenities. Updating planning permission rules to encourage a mix of plants and gravel, for instance, would help.

The United Nations identifies urban greenery as a key way to reduce heat in cities. The benefits extend beyond gardens: green roofs and balcony gardens can lower indoor temperatures by up to 11°C.

No single garden will transform a city’s climate, but when thousands of gardens are protected and restored across neighbourhoods, the combined cooling effect would become significant.

As climate projections show more frequent, longer and hotter summers, every square metre of restored vegetation matters. Domestic gardens are frontline defences against intensifying heatwaves.

By not opting for a tarmacked driveway or replanting the existing one, households can help cool their streets, protect vulnerable neighbours and reclaim a piece of Britain’s vanishing green heritage.

Karina Corada-Pérez does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Scientists have long thought humans have a uniquely difficult birth compared to other primates.

And it’s true that from an evolutionary perspective, we face an obstetrical dilemma. As we evolved to walk on two feet, our pelvis changed shape and size and our birth canal became smaller and oddly twisted. Meanwhile, the evolution of our enormous brain meant that a large-headed baby needed to fit through it.

But our new study found that some primates have to give birth to babies that are squashed even more tightly in the birth canal.

Primate births usually happen at night which makes them difficult to study, especially in the wild. Because of this, we do not know much about them. Rare observations suggest a more solitary, shorter and less noisy labour compared to humans.

To get around this lack of direct observations, in 1949, the Swiss anthropologist Adolph H. Schultz looked for clues in anatomy instead. He measured the size of the pelvic birth canal and of the neonatal head in humans and seven other primates. He wanted to find out how tightly the baby’s head fitted through the birth canal. His results suggested that humans were unique in having a rounder birth canal, one in which the baby’s head only just fitted through. Other great apes seemed to have an oval canal with plenty of space for the baby’s head. Schultz’s influential study shaped how we think about human birth as unusual and harder than other primates.

However, the way he measured the birth canal was based on human anatomy. And the human standard measure Schultz used did not actually reflect how much space there was. He used the distance between the top of the sacrum (a large triangular bone at the base of the spine) and the top of the pubis bone to represent the diameter of the canal (a standard obstetric measurement in humans). Since the sacrum sits higher in the pelvis in other primates, only its lower part forms part of their birth canal. This is why their birth canals appeared so elongated in his diagram.

Our study instead used 3D scans of the pelvis and measurements of the newborn head from 29 primate species, including humans, to revisit Schultz’s study using more appropriate measurements. We found that, in reality, many primates experience a much tighter fit than humans do.

Some of the most striking examples were squirrel monkeys and tamarins, small primates from Central and South America that live high in the tree canopy. Their babies are born with heads that are about double the size of the maternal pelvic canal.

Birth for squirrel monkeys and tamarins might seem impossible with such a head-to-pelvis disproportion, but a 1995 study provides an explanation. After many sleepless nights spent observing squirrel monkeys giving birth in a primate centre, doctoral researcher Melissa Stoller managed to take X-ray images of the labour, revealing that the monkey’s pelvic bones temporarily dislocate, creating extra space for the baby to pass through. We think a similar strategy may help bushbabies, whose newborns also have unusually large heads relative to the mother’s birth canal. As we showed in a 2025 study, the pelvis of female bushbabies (but not males) is open at the front, where their pubic bones do not meet and elastic connective tissue between them can stretch and expand during labour.

Another adaptation concerns the way the baby moves through the birth canal. In these species, babies usually enter the canal face-first rather than with the top of the head (the orientation assumed by Schultz in his diagrams). This reduces the amount of space needed during birth. Stoller’s X-ray study showed this in squirrel monkeys and baboons, and it may be common in other monkey species too.

Neither of these adaptations could be easily adopted by humans. Because we walk upright, our pelvis must provide stable support to our body and cannot easily stretch during labour. In fact, when the pelvic ring dilates too much during birth, this can lead to severe pelvic pain, and difficulty in walking after the birth. Instead, our babies have evolved a highly plastic head that can mould to the shape of the maternal birth canal as it passes through it.

The dangers of giving birth

Giving birth is neither easy nor risk free. Despite huge medical advances, we still see three maternal deaths per 1,000 live births worldwide, and more in low-income or war-torn countries. Birth is even riskier for babies, with 17 deaths per 1,000 live births in sub-saharan Africa. Maternal mortality rates were much higher a hundred years ago, before antibiotics and advances in obstetric care.

While these adaptations make birth possible, they do not necessarily make it easy. Going back to squirrel monkeys, despite their flexible pelvis they have high maternal and foetal mortality.

Looking even more widely across mammals, there are many examples of unique adaptations for apparently impossible births; from female bats having evolved a pelvic girdle fully open at the front so the pelvis is more of a horseshoe structure to accommodate enormous babies, to spotted hyenas having to give birth through their extremely large clitoris.

Primates, and mammals at large, show a diversity of obstetrical dilemmas, each solved in different ways depending on their anatomy, ecology and movement. If we are unique, so are all other species.

Lia Betti received funding from the Leverhulme Trust and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.

Nicole Torres Tamayo is currently working as a researcher at the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP-CERCA). She is affiliated with the Department of Anthropology of University College London and the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine od the University of Zurich.

The UK Space Agency and space startup Vast just signed an agreement to send Paralympic sprinter and below-knee amputee John McFall into orbit as early as 2027. Most coverage framed it as a victory for inclusion. As a space health researcher, I think something far more interesting happened.

For 70 years, spaceflight has assumed a rigid archetype: a healthy white man with a military background. The assumption was that physical uniformity minimised risk. As we prepare for Mars, the evidence increasingly suggests the opposite.

Star Trek understood this decades ago: exploration rewards difference. The further you travel into uncertainty, the more kinds of human experience you need. It debuted in 1966 with a Black female communications officer, a Japanese helmsman, a Russian navigator, a biracial Vulcan, and a captain who made mistakes and felt his humanity down to the last drop.

What strikes me now as a scientist is not how idealistic that vision was, but how practical. Despite decades of spaceflight, we still cannot reliably predict how one person’s health will change in space. Consider Mars 500, a 520-day simulated isolation mission between 2007 and 2011 where six male crew members in identical conditions diverged dramatically in psychological resilience. Two participants remained stable; three developed severe sleep disturbances; and one suffered persistent depression.

Additionally, around 17% of astronauts experience significant physical deterioration in spaceflight despite following identical exercise regimes. Disability does not necessarily introduce uncertainty into spaceflight; uncertainty is already the norm.

Who performs best in space?

Sometimes those excluded perform better. In 1961, several female pilots outperformed the men of Mercury 7 programme, the first US astronauts. Jerrie Cobb scored in the top 2% of all candidates ever assessed by Nasa. Several of the women outperformed the men on cardiovascular endurance. And the late Wally Funk remained in an isolation tank for over ten hours while the male Mercury astronaut record was just over three. But the women never flew. Nasa insisted on military jet pilot experience as an entry requirement, while simultaneously barring women from flying military jets.

About a decade earlier, Nasa recruited eleven deaf men to study motion sickness, a condition affecting 60 to 80% of astronauts in their first days of weightlessness. Motion sickness happens when conflicting inner-ear signals cause nausea and disorientation severe enough to impair performance. Most of the eleven men had lost vestibular function (the inner-ear balance system) following childhood meningitis. In rotating rooms and on rough seas, as experienced test pilots were sick around them, the deaf participants played cards. The trait that excluded them from military careers made them unusually tolerant of the environments that undid everyone else.

Researchers are finally investigating this issue: like asking whether amputees, who carry less mass and respond differently to microgravity, offer advantages in space. People with lower-limb mobility impairments or vascular differences may be naturally adapted to the headward fluid shifts of weightlessness that cause brain swelling and vision changes in around 70% of astronauts.

When a cooling leak filled Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano’s helmet with water during a 2013 spacewalk, it left him nearly blind and deaf to mission control. He survived by navigating back to the airlock using touch alone. On Mars where dust storms reduce vision to near-zero, blind people would have an advantage here as they are dependent on other senses.

There is no perfect astronaut

The myth of the perfect astronaut has always been just that – a myth. Chuck Yeager, celebrated as the gold standard of what an astronaut should be, broke two ribs the night before he broke the sound barrier in 1947. He concealed the injury, improvised a way to seal his cockpit door using a broom handle, and flew anyway. The right stuff was never about physical perfection. It was about adaptation.

In 1985, Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh manually docked with the dead and uncontrolled Salyut 7 station and spent a week manually rewiring it in freezing pitch-black conditions to bring it back to life. For many people in the disability community, navigating broken infrastructure, sensory issues and isolation is an everyday reality. Disabled people spend their lives adapting to environments designed for somebody else. That makes us experts at navigating the unknown.

The real “right stuff” is interdependence: being creative together with your crew when a plan fails. When Apollo 13’s oxygen tank exploded in 1970, the crew came home not because of perfect engineering, but because people depended on each other under pressure. A Mars mission, years from home and communication delays of 20 minutes each way, will demand it. Astronauts will face problems nobody could anticipate, because that is the nature of exploration.

Disability is an extreme environment

Every person who lives long enough will experience disability at some point. It is my normal. In my research career, I have improvised creative solutions to inaccessible equipment, and learned to pace my energy carefully. Even getting into the building or having access to a bathroom could be my engineering problem for the day.

I’ve been told using a mobility aid is unprofessional and for years, even doctors dismissed my symptoms. When they finally had an answer, it came with a caveat: there is no cure and no treatment pathway. The medical system had reached its limit. I had not. These experiences forced me to monitor my own health, adapt and advocate for myself. On a Mars mission, millions of miles from the nearest specialist, every astronaut will need exactly that skill.

Perhaps the most undervalued asset the disability community brings to space is its relationship with joy. Disabled people do not survive extreme environments through stoicism alone. They survive through humour, putting flowers on their wheelchairs (like mine), and deeply loving communities. On a three-year Mars mission, that may be the most critical thing of all.

Design can be better too. Deaf pilot Sheila Xu described in June 2026 at the United Nations how she designed a colour-changing light signal system to use instead of auditory cues during parabolic flights, aircraft that fly a steep arc to produce brief periods of weightlessness, used in astronaut training. It improved safety for everyone on board, deaf or not, when engine roar made verbal commands impossible. This is the “curb cut effect”: solve for the margins, and you make the system better for everyone.

The good news is we are seeing a paradigm shift. In 2021, Hayley Arceneaux spent three days in orbit on SpaceX’s Inspiration4, becoming the first person with a prosthetic bone to reach space. In 2025, ESA engineer Michaela Benthaus became the first wheelchair user on a suborbital commercial flight. McFall’s selection marks the first time a major space agency has cleared a disabled astronaut for long-duration scientific work in orbit.

Progress does not come from excluding each other, but from discovering what becomes possible when the universe’s criteria finally replace our own.

The goal, then, should not be simply to send one disabled astronaut to space and call it progress. It is to involve disabled thinkers, engineers, and designers at every stage of mission planning. The systems they would help build would be demonstrably better for it.

Adaptation, more than perfection, may turn out to be what matters most.

Zoe Elisabeth Swann Baillie, PhD is supported by funding from the Leverhulme Trust via the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space.

There’s a growing interest in alternatives to traditional burials as well as making the process more environmentally friendly in many countries. For many people it’s about the environmental impact of the funeral industry globally.

In the US, for instance, a surface equal to the size of Hawaii (1.6 million hectares) is deforested each year for manufacturing coffins. The amount of wood used is equal to building 4.5 million homes. Other costs include approximately 1.6 million tons of cement for graves. Carbon emissions from a single cremation are equivalent to those released by a private car driven for 3,369 kilometres.

Another factor is that many countries are running out of space in graveyards.

Discussions about the environmentally friendly aspects of dealing with death often take in woodland burial sites, memorials with bird boxes and using different coffin materials.

Two methods, burial and cremation, have been used in Europe for centuries. But a much wider range of burial techniques such as composting and water cremation are now starting to be offered more widely.

Water cremation, also called alkaline hydrolysis, is where the body is treated with 170°C hot water and an alkali-based solution, the results are then dried out, and ground down into a powder. These remains are then returned to relatives in an urn. This was introduced in Scotland as an option in March 2026 and is being discussed in England and Wales. It is also allowed in other countries including Australia, South Africa, some US states, Canada and Ireland.

Scotland’s public health minister Jenni Minto described this option as an “environmentally friendly alternative”.

---

Read more: Water cremation: sustainable body disposal is coming to Scotland – here are the benefits

---

Natural organic reduction or composting is already used in Ireland and Germany as well as Australia. In this form of human composting the body is placed in dry material such as hay, straw or wood-chips in a sealed container where microbes decompose the body into soil. This is then broken up into tiny particles and buried in a wooden vessel.

Are they better for the environment?

But how environmentally friendly are these newer methods compared with the conventional ones? To determine this, one must consider several factors. These include the choice of flowers for the funeral, the coffin, shrouding and embalming.

Another factor is the working conditions for employees in the funeral industry, since traditional treatment of the dead body often includes handling toxic chemicals in embalming, for example. The greatest environmental cost comes from transport: not only of the deceased, but also the number of mourners attending the funeral and how they travel.

Other factors can complicate comparisons. Crematoria differ widely between countries, both in terms of emissions and the process itself, depending on whether biofuels or diesel are used.

Different cultures also have different burial practices. In the United States, for instance, there is a practice of perpetual grave rights, where graves are supposed to last for eternity, combined with concrete burial vaults. This leads to a significantly high environmental impact.

In a report published in 2023, research from Linnaeus University in Sweden, examined composting, cremation and burial in Sweden. The study examines a wide range of factors beyond the disposal of the body itself. The findings show that all three methods mentioned above have relatively similar levels of environmental impact. When waste heat from crematoria is recovered and used for district heating (a form of centralised heating widely used in parts of Europe), cremation emerges as the best environmental option. Once again, like every method, it is the surrounding arrangements and transport that account for the greatest environmental impact.

Other research highlights how different funeral options are attempts to appeal to people’s desire for sustainability and naturalness. But reliable data on green disposal methods is hard to find and therefore can be difficult to analyse.

The ways in which dead bodies may also be handled are strongly shaped by cultural and religious beliefs. The most environmentally friendly method, dismembering bodies and placing them in nature, still used in Buddhist Tibet for instance, is unlikely to be acceptable in most modern societies, for both practical and emotional reasons.

Freezing in Sweden

In one bid to try something different, and more green, bodies in Sweden were kept frozen while awaiting the implementation of cryomation or freeze-drying. Twelve of them remained in storage for more than ten years.

In 2013, a legal decision on this case eventually required conventional burial, and the last bodies were buried in 2016.

In this case, the desire for an environmentally friendly disposal of the bodies, resulted instead in prolonged frozen storage with considerable environmental impact.

---

Read more: Gin Lane by William Hogarth is a critique of 18th-century London’s growing funeral trade

---

Cultural considerations are often important. The promotion of cremation around the turn of the 20th century, for example, reflected a society in which it was seen as hygienic and modern.

Today’s promotion of alternative methods similarly mirrors contemporary discussions in which environment and nature have become more regular debating points.

Ultimately, the question is not simply which method is the most environmentally friendly, but how societies negotiate the balance between ecological responsibility, cultural values and respect for the dead. Any meaningful shift towards what might appear to be greener choices will depend not only on technological innovation, but also on a broader cultural willingness to rethink what constitutes a dignified and meaningful farewell.

Lynn Akesson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Millions of people will take to the roads this holiday season, only to end up spending frustrating hours sitting in traffic jams. Congestion costs drivers time, fuel and patience – while also increasing pollution and placing huge pressure on transport networks.

If you’ve ever found yourself staring enviously at the lane next to you, convinced it’s moving faster, you’re not alone. Most of us instinctively believe that changing lanes will get us home sooner. But mathematics suggests this intuition is usually wrong.

As an applied mathematician, much of my research is driven by one question: how can we predict and control the behaviour of complex systems operating under uncertainty? And this can apply as much to holiday traffic as it does to emerging quantum technologies.

We tend to think traffic jams need a trigger: an accident, roadworks or a lane closure. Yet some of the most frustrating queues have no obvious cause at all. These are known as phantom traffic jams – stop-start waves that travel backwards through traffic even though every vehicle is moving forwards.

In 2008, Japanese researchers asked 22 drivers to drive around a circular track while maintaining a constant speed and safe distance from the vehicle in front. Within minutes, tiny and unavoidable differences in braking and reaction times grew into a stop-start wave that travelled continuously around the circuit, despite there being no obstacle anywhere on the road.

The explanation is surprisingly simple. One driver brakes slightly more than necessary. The driver behind reacts a little later and brakes a little harder. The next driver does the same.

In this way, the initial tiny disturbance grows as it travels backwards until drivers hundreds of metres behind are forced to stop completely, even though nobody can identify what caused the queue in the first place.

The mathematics behind traffic

Rather than modelling every driver individually, mathematicians treat traffic as a continuous flow – borrowing ideas from fluid dynamics, where the movement of vehicles is analysed much like the flow of water through a pipe.

One of the simplest relationships in traffic flow theory is q = ρv, where q is the traffic flow (the number of vehicles passing a point each hour), ρ is the traffic density (amount of cars on the road) and v is their average speed.

This deceptively simple equation explains a counterintuitive phenomenon. Initially, adding more vehicles obviously increases the overall traffic flow, as more vehicles pass along the road.

But once the road becomes too crowded, everyone is forced to slow down. Eventually, this reduction in speed outweighs the increase in number of vehicles such that the overall flow is reduced.

The equation shows there is an optimal traffic density that maximises the number of vehicles passing through the road each hour. Beyond that point, adding more cars reduces the efficiency of the road – and increases the time it takes everyone to get to their destination.

The same mathematics explains why constantly changing lanes is rarely worthwhile.

A lane change creates a small disturbance that neighbouring drivers must react to. If many drivers behave in the same way, these disturbances accumulate and increase the likelihood of traffic waves. So, what feels like a clever decision for one driver can ultimately make conditions worse for everyone.

Can maths help reduce traffic jams?

In my research on probabilistic mathematical methods, I develop approaches that combine prediction, coordinated decision-making and feedback to keep complex systems stable, even when the available information is incomplete or “noisy” (full of extraneous data).

In traffic, the disturbances we seek to prevent are the stop-start waves that create phantom traffic jams. In other complex systems, they might be power failures, communication bottlenecks or unstable autonomous systems.

Rather than designing solutions for one specific application, applied mathematicians develop general mathematical frameworks. That’s one reason why ideas originally developed for engineering systems can also help us think differently about traffic – with each of our mathematical tools playing a different role:

1. Signal processing transforms measurements from road sensors, cameras and connected vehicles into useful information.

2. Stochastic modelling accounts for uncertainty arising from driver behaviour, weather conditions and changing traffic demand.

3. Machine learning identifies patterns in all this data, and forecasts where congestion is likely to develop.

4. Control theory then closes the loop by determining how traffic systems should respond, whether by adjusting traffic-light timings, introducing adaptive speed limits, recommending alternative routes or coordinating fleets of autonomous vehicles.

Rather than optimising the journey for one driver, the objective becomes improving the performance of the entire traffic network.

Perhaps the most striking demonstration came in 2018, when researchers repeated the Japanese circular-track experiment with one key difference. They replaced one of the human-driven vehicles with a single autonomous car, programmed to accelerate and brake smoothly.

Remarkably, that one vehicle, less than 5% of the traffic, was enough to dampen the stop-start wave around the entire circuit, improving traffic flow and reducing fuel consumption for every driver involved.

Tips for your next car journey

Traffic congestion is unlikely ever to disappear completely. Population growth, increasing travel demands and the unpredictability of human behaviour will always put pressure on our roads.

But mathematics is helping us move away from reacting to congestion, towards preventing it.

One important aspect is understanding how large networks of interacting agents can make coordinated decisions using only local information, without requiring every component to know the state of the entire system. These ideas are central to the design of intelligent transport systems, where connected vehicles and infrastructure must cooperate to improve traffic flow.

In the meantime, if you’re about to set off on holiday in your car, here are three driving tips all backed up by strong mathematical evidence. If everyone adopts them, this should reduce the time you spend in traffic queues.

• Maintain a safe following distance;

• Accelerate and brake smoothly;

• Resist the temptation to keep switching lanes in search of tiny gains.

Applied mathematics shows the fastest way to your destination isn’t to drive more aggressively. It’s to help keep the entire system stable.

Randa Herzallah have received external research funding from the Leverhulme Trust ("Control of Behavioural Dynamics"), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and Isansys (ECG-derived biosignals PhD studentship, 2016–2019)

Sixty years ago, the United States and the Soviet Union were embroiled in a race to the Moon, which the USA won. The 21st-century lunar contest, with China stepping in for the Soviet Union, has many similarities, but key differences.

The Apollo astronauts planted the stars and stripes in lunar soil, bounced – and drove – around, set up experiments and collected scientifically valuable rock samples. Ultimately, however, there was no real plan to stay.

The new Moon race is different: space agencies are targeting the south pole of the Moon due to its deposits of water ice. This water can be used for life support on a lunar base. It can also be turned into rocket fuel, splitting it into the hydrogen and oxygen used by space vehicles, making it a valuable resource.

But ice deposits are not evenly distributed and suitable spots for establishing human outposts are finite. This could spark competition to bag the best spots. So will the US-China lunar contest turn into a land grab?

For anyone growing up in the 1980s and 90s, human space travel almost seemed to become “routine”, but that era was still mainly the domain of the US and the Soviet Union (and then Russia). While the European Space Agency was growing, it focused largely on robotic scientific mission and commercial launches. Now, 30 years later, the sector has grown massively, and space is no longer the sole domain of a few superpowers.

Around 20 nations are able to carry out space launches, mainly to send satellites into orbit. But there have also been privately funded robotic missions to the Moon – albeit with significant support from government agencies.

Despite this globalisation of space, only three countries are currently able to send humans into space using their own rockets: the US, Russia and China. This is largely a reflection of the fact that spaceflight gets much harder when people are involved, because they need continuous supplies of food, water, heat and air.

Space is an unforgiving environment, so there is absolutely no margin for error. There’s limited scope for backup or rescue, and so everything needs to be tested and tested again.

That’s part of the reason China is on track to catch up with the US and Russia in terms of achievements in space, despite starting decades later. As of 2021 they operate a modular, permanently crewed space station called Tiangong. While not as large as the International Space Station, there is plenty of scope for expansion.

The very successful Chang'e lunar programme has returned samples from the Moon’s far side, deployed relay satellites to provide more reliable communications, and explored the lunar terrain with rovers. It’s due to these successes that China, partnering with Russia, is the main competition for the United States in Moon race 2.0.

So how should we expect this lunar contest to unfold? The US-led effort has a medium-term goal of establishing a permanent human base at the south pole. These lunar outposts would probably operate in a similar way to the International Space Station, and the research bases in the Antarctic, staffed by rotating crews.

Nasa is using the Orion spacecraft to carry astronauts from Earth to our closest celestial neighbour. But they will need a separate vehicle to land. These landers do not yet exist in final form. Two companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX, are competing to develop separate landing craft. An important test will take place next year: for Nasa’s Artemis III mission, an Orion capsule will attempt to dock with one or both landers in low Earth orbit.

Over the next few years a fleet of robotic craft will also send experiments, deliver cargo and use drones and rovers to scout landing sites and locations for lunar outposts. Like the lunar lander, many of these missions will be led by private industry.

But the lunar south pole is a challenging place for astronauts to operate. The ice deposits are at the bottom of craters that never see sunlight, where temperatures are more than 200 degrees below zero. There are mountaintops near the pole that are almost always visible from Earth, but relay satellites in lunar orbit are needed to help with communications when they do drop over the horizon.

The Sun also rises to just a few degrees above the horizon, and is sometimes below it for days at a time – plunging some locations into darkness. The low temperatures require heating units for humans and equipment alike. But, with inconsistent sunlight to generate solar power, other energy sources, such as nuclear fission, will be needed to keep the batteries charged.

The next phase of lunar exploration, pencilled in for 2029-2032, should see the laying down of key infrastructure, such as power supplies and communications systems.

Drilling and digging will prepare the ground for an eventual base, which could be partly underground to protect against radiation and impacts by tiny space rocks. Nasa will also send a more sophisticated Japanese-built rover to the surface with a pressurised interior. This will allow astronauts to live and work in a mobile lab without bulky space suits

The plans for the final phase, from 2032 onwards, involves people living for long periods on the Moon, building up a modular base and taking advantage of the Moon’s resources to produce water, oxygen and even building materials.

For the rival effort to build a lunar base, China is partnering with Russia and collaborating with several other countries. Over the next couple of years, Beijing will test its Mengzhou crew capsule and Lanyue landing vehicle ahead of a first lunar landing around 2030.

Construction of a base, called the International Lunar Research Station, is scheduled to be underway by 2035. The planned location for this base is also the lunar south pole, so there’s a race to pick the best spot.

There’s plenty of science to be done by crews living in these bases, some of it related to understanding the structure and formation of the Moon itself, as well as investigations related to medical and materials research.

Another scientific goal could be to establish radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon, where they would be shielded from the sea of radio communications originating on Earth. This could allow astronomers to detect faint cosmic signals that are otherwise impossible to detect using ground-based instruments.

And the relatively low gravity of the lunar surface could make it easier than Earth for launching missions to other destinations in the solar system. By sending up components and assembling them on the Moon, future missions could use much larger, more capable spacecraft. That’s particularly important if there are people on any of those missions.

There are also economic benefits to having a lunar presence. Private companies will make money by building the landers, rovers and other key technologies. There may also be a market in transporting equipment and experiments to the lunar surface. Making rocket fuel on the Moon would make space exploration cheaper than lugging it from Earth. It could even be used to refuel satellites in Earth orbit.

If humanity can do one thing well, for better or worse, it’s to exploit the natural environment.

The 1979 United Nations Moon Agreement states that no one can claim sovereignty over the Moon, and must use its resources responsibly – which sounds promising. Unfortunately, almost none of the countries involved with Artemis, including the US and UK, have signed it. As scientists, we live in hope that this doesn’t all turn into a big land grab.

Chris North does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Mountain snow and meltwater from glaciers in the Himalayas determine how much water is available for drinking, farming and hydropower for millions of people in India, Pakistan, Nepal, China and Afghanistan.

This is especially important during the spring and early summer crop-growing season when meltwater helps sustain the flow of rivers and provides the region with a vital buffer against the worst impacts of a dry season or drought. Because many of these rivers cross national borders, changes in water supply can also heighten regional tensions when resources are scarce.

Meltwater from snow is one of the pillars of survival – but it’s proved difficult in the past to get accurate measurements across this challenging terrain.

So measuring where and how much snow falls is essential. My team’s new research gives improved estimates of snowfall across the west-central Himalayas. Results show that in just one winter, the previous best available snowfall analyses underestimated total seasonal snowfall by 37% over Lake Hampta area in Himachal Pradesh. By including new snowfall observations, we reduced that error dramatically.

Why snowfall predictions have been wrong

Because most instruments were originally designed to measure rain over very small areas, rather than snowfall spread across large areas, most calculations of snowfall levels have historically been inaccurate. A rain gauge around the size of a dinner plate was used in the past – too small for the purpose and therefore missing large amounts of snow. These small devices were particularly bad at catching snow during strong winds. As a result, mountain water resources are often misunderstood and have been underestimated by 50–100% over the years.

To change this, we developed a new way to measure snowfall using commercially available water-pressure sensors deployed on the lakebeds. The team installed these instruments at three lakes – Ghepan and Hampta in the western Himalayas, and Mugu in Nepal. Unlike conventional instruments, these sense the whole lake surface – an area of thousands to billions of square metres – to measure the timing and intensity of snowfall. These use water pressure in lakes to directly measure the mass (water content) of accumulating snow, providing an accurate and unbiased estimate of snowfall. This is based on Archimedes principle of displacement: as snow accumulates on a frozen lake, it changes the water pressure beneath.

Snowfall from these devices was analysed and used to refine physical processes in a weather model. This is the same model which provides weather predictions over the UK but is customised for mountainous regions. The results show the model can generally reproduce both when the snow falls and how much accumulates, and is particularly good at representing extreme snowfall events. We now have new insights into where and when snow falls across the region at much finer detail than previous estimates, making mountain water resources more predictable. In contrast, a snowfall map based on previous analysis shows a much more uniform distribution and considerably less snowfall.

Planning for water shortages

This information could help regional communities adapt and improve water planning, help manage reservoirs and protect vulnerable infrastructure from snow-related hazards. It could also support engineering interventions such as snow harvesting in areas that receive abundant snowfall, for example, by artificially storing meltwater in community-managed reservoirs and into ice stupas (an artificial glacier) designed to gradually release water during the growing season.

An understanding of when snow falls will be crucial for predicting when it will melt and how much water will flow into rivers and help communities and policymakers better prepare for future water shortages.

The Himalayan ice fields are important because they are the largest permanent ice-cover outside of the polar regions and contain some of the largest reservoirs of freshwater on earth.

With this region starting to see more water shortages it’s time to start reassessing reliance on mountain water supplies. But how much water the mountains provide, and how it will change, remain remarkably uncertain.

Good measurements of snowfall are now more important than ever for predicting the future of water resources, which until now have been lacking. For example, a single long-running active weather station above 4,000 metres has provided one of the few continuous snowfall records across the vast 566,000 square kilometres of Himalayan headwaters that feed the Brahmaputra, Indus and Ganges river basins.

This work is also deeply personal for me. I grew up in a city just 50 kilometres from the outer Himalayas. On family holidays, I was captivated by the thriving beauty of pines and junipers against the backdrop of the Himalayas, while learning that mountains and rivers are more than just landscapes. Those experiences fostered a lasting connection to the region, and I continue to return to the mountains whenever I can.

Water is a precious commodity upon which every society depends, and shortages can cause untold misery.

With better snowfall estimates, we are already beginning to understand how to make the future of the mountain eco-system more predictable, and help people cope.

Siddharth Gumber receives funding from the National Environmental Research Council (NERC), The Big Thaw project (NE/X005267/1).

Airline passengers are being warned not to pack power banks in their hold luggage ahead of the summer holiday travel period.

Devices with rechargeable batteries, like mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and smartwatches can be plugged into power banks on the go, where charging sockets may not be available. However, power banks are not danger-free or environmentally friendly.

The warning has come from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which believes that many travellers still aren’t aware of the rules – or the fire risk.

Passengers on UK flights must take power banks – and other items containing lithium batteries – with them into the cabin. They must never be used to charge another electronic device while on the plane. Additionally, only two power banks per person are allowed on a flight.

Consider a scenario where you are about to take off on a flight. You have settled into your seat, started using your mobile phone, and put it in airplane mode. All of a sudden, an unusual hissing sound comes from your bag; smoke starts rising, and within seconds, there is a fire inside your luggage.

This actually happened on a flight between South Korea and Hong Kong in January 2026, when a power bank caught fire in mid-air. The accident on this flight is not a rare occurrence; hundreds of fires, explosions and other safety incidents involving lithium batteries and power banks have been recorded by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The main reason for accidents involving power banks is the lithium-ion battery, the most common battery type used in them. The lithium-ion battery has a tendency to overheat, which can trigger a thermal runaway in which the temperature rises rapidly, leading to the battery’s explosion.

Such an explosion can occur for many reasons, including poor design, manufacturing issues, and improper use. In 2017, a family in the UK woke to smoke filling their home. The cause of the fire was a power bank charger, plugged into an electrical outlet. It overheated and set itself ablaze. Their rooms were burned down.

From a scientific point of view, the answer is obvious: heat is the sworn enemy of lithium-ion batteries. Each time you recharge or discharge a power bank, chemical reactions produce heat in the battery. And if that heat is not properly controlled – whether due to inadequate design or excessive environmental temperature – a thermal runaway occurs (an uncontrolled, self-heating chain reaction).

In 2026, an Australian man left a power bank in his vehicle on a hot day in Mount Nathan in Queensland. The extreme heat caused the battery to explode, starting a fire. Luckily, no one was injured in the incident.

Electric shocks

Fire and explosions are not the only hazards associated with these gadgets. They can also cause a dangerous electrical shock to users. This is despite the fact that they are operating at lower direct current voltage.

If the power bank becomes faulty due to being dropped, getting wet or because of manufacturing defects, the circuitry inside may fail. This would cause the device to shoot a surge of electricity into the user’s body.

In May 2026, a 75-year-old woman in the US died when her power bank exploded while charging it.

China, which manufactures many of the world’s power banks, has seen manufacturers recall hundreds of thousands of devices due to defects. Some of these faults have been blamed on downstream suppliers.

Another alarming trend has been the rise of counterfeit power banks.

I have spent a great part of my career and life caring about the environment and developing eco-friendly technologies, and the widespread use of power banks is a serious concern due to their negative environmental impact. The manufacturing and disposal of power banks may generate large amounts of electronic waste that can pollute soil, water and air.

Moreover, the extraction of lithium and other materials for power-bank production poses environmental and societal risks. For example, lithium mining in Chile’s Atacama desert has resulted in pollution and friction with indigenous communities.

As a scientist and professor of engineering, I urge people to be aware of the potential dangers posed by power banks and how these risks can be mitigated. By adhering to precautions, such as charging devices on hard, non-flammable surfaces, we can ensure the safe usage of these devices.

In addition, it is vital to understand the significance of responsible innovation and sustainability to ensure that technologies can be safely developed and deployed.

Your power bank is a powerful tool, but it demands respect. Treat it with the caution it deserves.

Amor Abdelkader does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.